Overview
NVIDIA-Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 is a 9-billion-parameter language model that NVIDIA trained from scratch and released on Hugging Face on August 18, 2025.
- License: NVIDIA Open Model License (commercial use allowed)
- Context length: 128K tokens
- Architecture: Mamba2-Transformer hybrid (Nemotron-H)
- Languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese
- Minimum hardware: ~10-12 GB VRAM at 4-bit; runs 128K on a single 22 GB A10G in bf16
- Strengths: toggleable reasoning, math, code, tool calling
Highlights
- Unified reasoning + chat — emits an explicit thinking trace that can be toggled off via the system prompt.
- Thinking-budget control — a runtime cap on how many tokens the model spends reasoning.
- Mamba2-Transformer hybrid — the Nemotron-H architecture with a 128K-token context window.
- Single-GPU target — distilled to run full 128K context on one A10G (22 GiB) in bfloat16.
What it's good at
This is a unified reasoning and chat model: it can produce an explicit thinking trace before its final answer, and that behavior can be turned off through the system prompt (with a small accuracy cost on hard prompts). It also supports a runtime thinking-budget control that caps how many tokens it spends reasoning. On NVIDIA's published benchmarks in Reasoning-On mode it edges out Qwen3-8B, scoring 72.1% on AIME25, 97.8% on MATH500, 64.0% on GPQA, 71.1% on LiveCodeBench, and 90.3% on IFEval. It handles tool and function calling (66.9% on BFCL v3) and supports English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Japanese. NVIDIA reports up to 6x higher inference throughput than comparable models in long-output reasoning settings.
Running locally
The model targets a single GPU: NVIDIA distilled it specifically to run inference at the full 128K context on one A10G (22 GiB) in bfloat16. At 4-bit quantization it fits in roughly 10-12 GB of VRAM. It runs through Hugging Face transformers (it needs trust_remote_code=True because of the custom Nemotron-H modeling code), and is also served on vLLM, NVIDIA NIM, Together AI, OpenRouter, and Amazon Bedrock. Recommended sampling is temperature 0.6 and top_p 0.95 with reasoning enabled.
License
Use is governed by the NVIDIA Open Model License Agreement. NVIDIA states the model is ready for commercial use, and the license permits commercial deployment and derivative work under its terms rather than a standard OSI license like Apache 2.0 or MIT.
